A "serving" of icing?

Sounds fairly easy to me: weight every ingredient that goes into your cake or cookies in grams. Then you might end up with something like 300gr butter, 500gr flower, 200gr icing sugar etc.. and safe it as a recipe for you (you can delete it later on if you wish). So you have several options. Create an entry for 100gr, and weight the piece you're eating and log that in grams. Safe it as how many servings you have and log one serving, or safe everything as one serving and log in fractions, like 1/12 for 1 from 12 cookies. or if fractions doesn't work you log it as 1/12 = 0.0833 servings.

I think you are asking about how to set the servings for a recipe, and the answer is: however you like. I like to do the math to set it to 100 g since that is just easy in practice, in many cases, but if I intend for something to be 10 servings or 6 or 4, depending on what it is, I might use that and then make sure I note the total weight so I can measure stuff out and log it accurately. (Others set it so a serving is 1 g -- total weight of 455 g = 455 servings -- to make logging easier, but I prefer the 100 g for that.) If you make enough icing for 12 cupcakes you might just use 12 and then not worry about the fact that the cupcakes won't be perfectly the same (that's what I would do). Whatever you set the servings as, the recipe builder will adjust.

rwarren1969 wrote: »

BarbaraHelen2013 wrote: »

As for your cornbread - without knowing your particular recipe, I can’t tell if it’s accurate, but if you go through each ingredient in your recipe and sanity check the individual items you’ll be as accurate as you can be.

Here is my recipe: https://www.canadianliving.com/food/baking-and-desserts/recipe/corn-bread-loaf

Instead of baking it in 9x13, I made 3 mini loaves. One of these was hiding in my freezer till recently, the other 2 were given away by the Food Fairy. This isn't something I bake regularly, but when I get stuck with half a box of buttermilk, I pull it out.

So, look at it...add all the ingredients' calories and then divide.

I make cornbread with pumpkin or apple instead of oil and/or egg. If I make it with buttermilk and/or butter and egg, then a small cupcake/muffin size cornbread muffin is over 200 calories. If I make it without the oil/butter it's about 120-160 calories (I'm going by memory here.) Cornmeal, flour, and sugar just by themselves are pretty calorie-dense.

You'll have to weigh loaves and divide if you're using loaves.

rwarren1969 wrote: »

BarbaraHelen2013 wrote: »

I’m a little confused by your comments on ‘the system codes things weirdly’?

Looking back on the recipes (sweet and savory) I;ve already entered....

"egg whites" = not the crack an egg and separate it kind, but some commerical egg replacement.
"salt and pepper" = potato chips? Something salt and pepper flavored, not the spices. Another recipe turned an unusual imported abbreviation into 1/2 CUP of salt.
"lemon slice" = Not a piece of a fresh lemon, but some Weight Watchers diet food!
"green pepper" = Not a fresh pepper but something measured by the tub with hudnreds of calories!

This I find extremely frustrating and offputting.

Also with quantities. When you bake you don't use 1 tsp or 1 tbsp of sugar, you use 1 cup. And when there are 20 different kinds of plain old white sugar, and you have to scroll through to find one that uses measurements that make sense to you, it makes me want to give up recording my food.

On the positive side I do appreciate that Canadian branding (including local store brands) are readily available to choose.

Well, you have to look at the item before you use it!

There are tens of millions of entries in the database and 99.9% of them have been entered by other users.

If you don't want to enter each item you use into the database yourself, then you'll have to take a bit of time up-front to check the entries before you use them.

If something is correct *enough* but just uses tsp instead of "cup" then do the math. There are thousands of metric conversion tools on the internet.

Adding to the above: If you use the recipe builder in web MFP, the following may not be obvious. (I think the phone/tablet app works similarly, but probably looks a little different on screen. I prefer using web browser MFP for recipes, so I'm less familiar with that function on my phone/tablet.)

On the web, after submit the recipe URL, you get a list of (it says) matched ingredients. If you hover your cursor over the upper right "blank" area of an ingredient's line, you'll see the options "edit quantity" "replace" and "remove". If you think an item is wrong calorically, click on "replace" and it will give you some additional options, where you can click on quantities and such to modify.

If you think none of those are suitable, change the words in the search box a little (like put in a brand name if you're using a branded product, or add a sensible adjective that applies, like "yellow" or "fine" with cornmeal, and you'll get different options. (If somethings really wonky and hard to get good entries, sometimes I whip out my phone and search ingredients as if I were going to add them to my daily log, because that gives me more options at a time to look at.) For example, I'm guessing your weird green pepper entry might've brought up a database item (badly named) for (maybe) green peppercorns. Try something with adjectives, like "pepper bell sweet green raw". (I've listed multiple adjectives, you probably don't need all of them.)

Just for fun, I imported your cornbread link, to see how long it would take as an experienced MFP user. I double checked 3 of the ingredients (via that "replace" thing) because I wasn't sure, and to keep ithe steps realistic. I even checked one item on my phone, as described above. (FWIW, they each turned out to be close enough for my tastes - sometimes different brands vary by a few calories.) It took just less than 4 minutes to add the recipe this way. (I admit, it would take longer if you're just learning how to use the tool. Things tend to be slower when we're new to them, and I get that that can be frustrating.)

If I use the cornbread web site's default of 15 servings for their 9"x13" pan, it comes out to 260 calories per serving. So, 228 for a slice of a mini-loaf could be right, depending on how you cut it. Butter, sugar, and flours are calorie dense, unfortunately for those who enjoy eating them!

I think many of us have some sticker shock at the calorie price of certain things, when we first start logging. However, that's a separate thing from whether the calories are correct, or not. So, the "1 cup of butter at 1600 calories" may be bizarre, but that's about right.

(If the problem is that you want tablespoons vs. a cup, you can use the "edit quantity" to adjust the recipe. I'm sure that as a baker you know that with Imperial volume measures, 1 cup is 16 tablespoons, and of course that makes 1 tablespoon 1/16 of a cup, or 0.0625 of a one-cup serving, times 3 (0.1875 of a cup) if it's 3 tablespoons or something like that. Same deal in reverse with sugar: If the item is in tablespoons, and you need a cup, you can use the "edit quantity" to put 16 in a tablespoons entry, or check the serving size drop down to see if 1 cup is on the list - it often will be, but not always.)

Yup, there's arithmetic. I don't like arithmetic, but working with calories has made me better at doing it, which is useful in other ways. As a recipe person, you're probably already better at arithmetic than I am, from doubling/halving recipes and whatnot, maybe.

I hear what you're saying, truly I do. Using a new tool, and thinking about food in a slightly different way, is difficult, can be challenging, frustrating, even a bit overwhelming. There is a learning process, and things take longer at first. They get faster and even quite automatic, maybe even easy, once we get familiar. Whether calorie counting is going to work out for you in the longer run is going to be up to you. It's not the only approach that can work, although it's one that works great for me (and some other folks).

Folks on this thread are absolutely not trying to bully you - I'm for sure not. We're trying to help you use these tools. If you decide you don't like the tools, don't want to use them, that's totally up to you, and totally fine.

Best wishes!

All I want to say is I have a severe weakness for icing. Back in the day I'd simply whip up some peanut butter frosting and stuff cinnamon graham crackers with it. Course I wasn't counting calories then. Wouldn't dare to do that now.
You're so much stronger than I am.

rwarren1969 wrote: »

BarbaraHelen2013 wrote: »

I’m a little confused by your comments on ‘the system codes things weirdly’?

Also with quantities. When you bake you don't use 1 tsp or 1 tbsp of sugar, you use 1 cup. And when there are 20 different kinds of plain old white sugar, and you have to scroll through to find one that uses measurements that make sense to you, it makes me want to give up recording my food.

I get the impression it's the norm in the US but in the UK most use grams (or ounces if someone is older and resistant to change 😂) to weigh most solid things and only use teaspoons/tablespoons for small amounts of liquid (milliliters for larger amounts), or a small amount of salt or spices that a standard kitchen scale wouldn't pick up or be especially accurate for. Although the nerdier of us have gram scales for that when precision is important. It's more accurate than volume measurements for solids and I find it reasonably easy to input recipes.

The way I do it is on the mobile app. The website absolutely sucks for inputting and finding recipes when you've got hundreds of them. I write the recipe using the bulk import ingredients setting, and then when the app comes up with its list, I check and amend it. I scan barcodes if necessary (ensuring the data matches what the packet says) or just use what's there if there's something that matches for calories because a) I don't care about tracking macros and b) the macros on many entries are wrong. I almost never use the importing recipes from websites because the parsing of those sucks, and people often put instructions next the the ingredient which confuses poor old MFP.

It's laborious at first but you do get a feel for what's right and wrong, and how to put the magic words in in the first place to get a good entry so it becomes pretty painless. It'll take me less than 5 minutes to input an average recipe now, and once it's there I can amend it if I make any major changes. I denote this with "modified" in the title if I have diverged from the recipe.